The lie by lie dismantling of the Office of the Vice President

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

It's pretty simple.  Any contacts between Iraq's leadership and Al Qaeda were the vapor forming over a brew concocted by the Office of the Vice President and his allies in the Pentagon.

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

"This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq," Cheney told Limbaugh's listeners about Zarqawi, who he said had "led the charge for Iraq." Cheney cited the alleged history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would "play right into the hands of al-Qaeda."

Wrong again.  In spite of what he tells Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney knows that's wrong.  He knows he lied.  He remembers  -- certainly others remember clearly the pressure he put on the CIA to go along with the fiction.  Reliable intelligence in the form of rebuttals was deliberately kicked out of the way.

When a senior intelligence analyst working for the government's counterterrorism task force obtained an early account of the conclusions by Feith's office -- titled "Iraq and al-Qaida: Making the Case" -- the analyst prepared a detailed rebuttal calling it of "no intelligence value" and taking issue with 15 of 26 key conclusions, the report states. The analyst's rebuttal was shared with intelligence officers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but evidently not with others. 

Sydney Blumenthal wrote in late 2003, in "How Bush Rules":

If the CIA would not serve, it would be trampled. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld formed the Office of Special Plans, a parallel agency under the direction of the neoconservative deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, to "stovepipe" its own version of intelligence directly to the White House. Its reports were not to be mingled or shared with the CIA or State Department intelligence for fear of corruption by skepticism.

Now it becomes the responsibility of Congress to deal with the lies of a vice president in a way which is commensurate with the damage those lies have done.